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Creating titles with Alpha in AE for FCP composite later
I’ve searched on this on these forums and Google but have not had a satisfactory answer yet. I would like to create some fancy titles for a film in AE. I am wondering if the pros out there have done anything similar to this and could give me some advice and keep me trouble free.
I don’t want to do color correction in AE but do it after I have a final cut in FCP (excuse the pun), therefore someone suggested I do the titles in AE as an alpha composition on top of my video cut for the title sequence and then export it as alpha and later I can composite it in FCP with my fine cut and color correction. Whew! So in order to keep my titles white and perform a color correct in FCP later without affecting the white titles I’d like to keep them separate.
The reason for AE is the fact that FCP can’t do the type of titles I want in terms of animation. Letters appearing out of mist, then dissipate into curling smoke… The questions are:
If my original film is in DVCPRO 50 / 24 FPS do I use the Animation codec at 23.98FPS in order to export a file of just the titles with an alpha channel that I can later composite in FCP on top of my footage?
Would it give me problems to do such fine particle animation (smoke, mist) with the alpha channel later in compositing in FCP?
Thank you very much. Your help and advice would be much appreciated.
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Point Zero Pictures
https://www.pointzeropictures.com -
5 Replies
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One of my favorite ways to preserve alpha is a PNG sequence, uncompressed decent file sizes and the great thing about an image sequence, (maybe not in your case) but if you rework something in one part you can rerender out the part that is changed and not have to render out and entire sequence again.
Just be sure to make a separate folder for each render and then set the RGB+Alpha from the setting thing in render queue.
you can import this into Final cut as a seuqence and your all set.
be sure to check your alpha by clicking on the little checkerboard in the monitor window of AE, also for Matte-wise, use a background color from the composition setting to represent the footage you are compositing. for blending purposes.
Cheers,
Andrew Kramer -
Thanks a lot Andrew. I will try this technique and keep everyone posted here of my experiences. I enjoyed your tutorials on your site as well (pity your samples gallery for cinema effects is blank on the site). cheers — miklos
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Point Zero Pictures
https://www.pointzeropictures.com -
Blank?
Try downloading the latest Flash Player from macromedia.comGood luck,
Andrew -
Sorry, my bad. Using Firefox with a Flash blocker. Usually a button comes up though when there is Flash content, don’t know why it didn’t show on your page… cheers and thank again (love your HD stock stuff too)
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Point Zero Pictures
<https://www.pointzeropictures.com> -
Andrew,
Actually your suggestion doesn’t work in FCP5. I do exactly as you said in AFX, in the “make movie” render options as PNG with Alpha “millions +” – I get a series of PNG files, one fo each frame. However, when I try to either import or drag and drop into the FCP browser FCP 5 gives me an error that that file format is not recognized. I tried this with just one individual file and the series, no luck, FCP just won’t take it. I’m now exporting as a QT .mov “Lossless with Alpha” and that works fine including fine soft drop shadows on the type and it looks nice and clean. cheers………………………….
Point Zero Pictures
<https://www.pointzeropictures.com>
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